W
A lot of what interests me, as a graphic designer about to enter the professional world, is this extreme break in my experiences versus those of the people I will likely be working under. I see that technology and the way the computer has been used as a more and more important tool in the designer’s toolbox has changed something about the fundamental practice of graphic design. I think, maybe not at the highest levels so much but, the way that the craft has been approached. I worked with a RISD graduate last summer at adidas, he’s only 28 and the comparisons between our experiences at school are vastly different and he graduated in 2002. So what I am interested in talking to you about is the shift of graphic design throughout your career and the movement from a tactile discipline that really valued the craft and the cutting and pasting of “design” – a real technical aspect to a more computer based medium in a lot of ways because now what you do to quote Michael Bierut “what used to take you a week can now take you a few hours on the computer”. So I would like to start a conversation about this.
Has this big shift affected your process. The fact that maybe clients are demanding things faster now and requesting a speedier iteration of your work.
P
First of all, technology always changes, and I’ve worked in the field for over thirty years. And the advantage of working in the field over thirty years is that I don’t have any expectation that technology isn’t going to change- because it always did. I think there was a period, perhaps pre-World War I to maybe the seventies when type-setting started to change where things were relatively the same so people did things the same way but when I started out type was linotype or handset you set from a type house and that if you wanted to enlarge something or see something bigger you did it on a LUCY (sp?) machine then you used a stab camera then you used a Xerox machine, then you used a computer, then you used a fast computer, then you do things in dimension, then you make things animate, then you make things interact, and the idea that you can do all these things and that you’ll always be changing is something that I think everyone has to become incredibly comfortable with because the technology is, if it changed this much in thirty years think how much it will change in the next thirty years.
I think things like mouses, for example I still would argue that that’s going to be like looking at a dial-up phone like this. I mean it’s a ridiculous tool. I mean, You should be on the screen or touching it or moving it, it should be much more like your iPhone. And you can tell that the minute the iPhone was invented you knew how dumb this is. I mean I think that craft is there because as long as you can see and as long as you can make value judgements about things, that’s what craft is. Craft isn’t just you know cutting something with an X-acto knife and pulling it together, I mean I’m sitting with my team all the time making them craft the typography appropriately by closing up spaces and taking care that positioning is right and scale is right and the proportions of things are right. All of that matters because craft is at the heart of everything. So if you think well but you don’t craft it appropriately its going to look like crap-ola. What always happens with technology, traditionally, and what will continue to happen is that the first guys on it are the technological geeks and they have bad design skills so everything looks like holy hell until the designers get out of their fear of the thing and they get on it and all of a sudden its craft again. So craft does not go away.
I mean things take different lengths of time. I mean my, when I worked at CBS records, I used to do a hundred and fifty covers a year. There were about twenty-five people in the department we did the mechanicals by hand, everything was crafted and put together and there were a hundred and twenty five covers a year. Last year they did about the same hundred and twenty five covers with a hundred people and computers. So the volume is the same and the amount they’re outputting is the same and the equipment is so much faster so what are they doing with the extra time?
Do you know what they’re doing with the extra time?
W
No?
P
They’re making changes. What was great about the lack of technology was the fact that because it took more time to do something it was a discipline for people’s behavior. If you don’t have until the last minute to get the copy correct before you pass it on to the designer to layout then you’ll just take the last time or if you can be sloppy about it then change it and change it and change it cause it doesn’t take that much time then you’re going to do that. The timing expands to peoples incompetence, it isn’t so much that the thing is a time saving device.
W
Would you say that given the way the culture has shifted really even in the past ten years with the rise of the internet and the instantaneous live-blogging and all of these kind of things where there is total lack of the editorial – very sloppy, lots of typos. Do you see this happening in design at all. That some tiny little details that normally would have been picked up because there was so much care put into the fact that it is going to get sent out and made into metal or a die is going to be cut…
P
I think people are always sloppy when they can be. I don’t think that that has changed. I think that is part of – technology changes all the time, people don’t. If people can put off making decisions, if people are give an opportunity to be lazy and sloppy or fearful they will be. If people are inspired to greater noble heights, to rise to a greater calling to do better work, to be nobler human beings by some leader they will do that to. You know, people are people and the technology doesn’t do this to them, they are who they are.
If you can be sloppy on the internet and you don’t have to be edited and you can write with a pseudoname and get away with it then you know fine but then also how much import does it have. Its just a, you know, anything that is its own reward.
W
You mention that people aren’t changing and, I would have to disagree, because being a student now, surrounded by other student designers, and I know you’re a teacher at SVA so I am sure you are in touch with that. Do you think that there is this big shift in the way people are thinking and I see that a lot of times the solution is almost to immediately go to the computer when we aren’t directed specifically where to go.
P
What’s wrong with that?
W
I think that it limits the student’s perspective as how to approach a project.
P
Why?
W
I think that there is a lot more that can be discovered through exploration of different media as a graphic designer.
P
Where should they go?
W
I think that one should still start in a sketch book…
P
Why?
W
Because I think that it allows you to more fluidly express your views and not
P
Well you sound like an old person.
W
I don’t know if that’s a compliment or a dig…
P
No, I’m just saying that I happen to use a sketchbook and I don’t go to the computer but I don’t think that somebody that goes to the computer is necessarily more penned-in than someone that goes to a sketchbook… Some people use the computer as a sketchbook. You know it really depends upon how you think. I mean sometimes, I don’t have my sketchbook with me and I’ll do it on a napkin, sometimes I’ll do it in my head. Sometimes I’m doing it in a taxi cab. Sometimes I’ll be standing behind somebody at the computer and I’ll say “what do you think about doing blah blah blah,” and we just do it right there.. theres was no sketchbook, just a thought. You could have a thought anywhere – I mean the point is to think, its not really how you express it.
W
But I think that there is a tendency that a lot of what comes off the computer
P
I mean cause you did just say to be that young people have different attitudes then you went in and sort of spewed out a really old-age attitude.
W
Well no, but that’s my attitude… The attitude of a lot of students is that the way that…
P
But that’s not an attitude that’s just where they’re sitting
W
But don’t you think that that theres..
P
They don’t have a pad.
W
Well everyone has a pad.
P
Not necessarily.
W
But I think that the way that the model of the computer corners you into something that is very flat at times – and I think you see that a lot.
P
But that depends on who the designer is. I mean, I think that is a generalization. There are broad generalizations in what you’re talking about but that’s assuming everybody that wants to be a designer is going to be good. You know, only a small percentage of people who study design, number one continue to practice and number two develop real voices that matter. And they usually do it not in art school, they do it later, they discover something later and how they get there is really irrelevant. Most students start out by copying, they should, how else are you going to learn if you don’t copy – I mean that’s how everybody begins.
I don’t think, I think that the technology will always grow and change but I don’t think it’s a thing that changes human behavior all that much. I think it creates tempests in teaports.
W
Well how would you compare a school that’s cranking out a slick looking portfolio that jumps its students right into photoshop, creating album covers and all that kind of thing… Those students never understand or learn typography theory or the book arts.
P
But they might learn it later.
W
Do you think that that is still an equally positive way to approach design, going for this finished product from the beginning and not necessarily having and understanding of where these things came from and actually working with metal type and gaining an appreciation for a more holistic form of graphic design. Because design education is definitely moving away from that and I’d love to hear your opinion… I can’t speak on behalf of other design schools but RISD really values that foundation of design principles – valuing content over form.
P
Well, I actually am of a couple minds, about it… I mean my students… I can tell you about RISD versus other schools is that the students I’ve hired from RISD are typographically, I think very limited because they seem to be so overly structured in the way they approach typography that they have no ability to be really expressive or express or understand how to create something that is specific to a place and a condition, not to a theory. And that’s problematic. So I, I don’t know about the book craft, but the gridded aspect of the way they’re teaching – I find it very frustrating. Drew (Freeman) can tell you chapter and verse about me shaking him up to try to get him out of it.
Because its its limiting as a communication tool.. I think that the thing that bothers me about schools in general is not how they go about teaching craft, because all schools do it differently. At SVA they have a broad amount of craft courses and they also have- they have all kinds of courses, students come out in all different forms. At Yale they’re very much focused on political action and at Cranbook, I don’t know what the hell they’re focused on … Its usually some form of other form of exploration that seems anti-business world.
But what I don’t see enough of anywhere is some form of teaching, and maybe you can’t do this separate from a client being involved, some form of teaching that enables the student to make understandable analogies to the public. Because in the end that’s what makes effective communication. You’re supposed to know your craft. If you’re going to practice without knowing your craft that’s number one, but if you can’t communicate spirit or make information understandable to people then you haven’t really designed. All you’ve really done is laid out a grid.
That’s really to me what matters, you know as we communicate in different forms whether, I mean right now, I’ll go upstairs and I’ll work on an environmental project, I’ll work on a project that’s an interactive digital display, I’ll work on about two or three identities, and I’ll work on a magazine on the web. They’re all different forms of communication in terms of what the discipline is but they all involve on thing in common, and the one thing in commons… understanding how to make information relevant to a specific audience.
W
It’s about context.
P
We’ll its really other, its about what does somebody out there understand and how can I get them to be interested or how can I charm them in a way that makes them want to be interested or how can I project something about a place or a system or an institution or organizations that makes them become capable of recognizing it the next time they see it.
W
But I think that’s wholly connected to really understanding not only your client but also your end receiver.
P
Well yes that is the…
W
Right but that’s all about building context and the better understanding you have of where your work is going to exist then the more effective its going to be. And I would agree with you that a lot of it, especially at RISD, sometimes seems disconnected and there isn’t really the thought of professional practice in any of this it
P
Its about doing it in some vacuum.
W
Right, where it will never exist in – so why design in a vacuum? And I have been really interested in, throughout my few years at RISD, this new “buzzy” collaboration of design and business – which, when more closely examined, really isn’t new at all. You have individuals like Chris Pullman and Lou Dorfsman who did it years ago and created a perfect synergy of the two disciplines and generated work that affected the business beyond aesthetic superficiality. I’d love to hear your opinion on all of this – I don’t know if you’re familiar with Bruce Nussbaum and BusinessWeek (P: chuckles) And its all so surface and nothings really being…
P
Well he doesn’t know very much
W
Well he’s not a designer, he’s a journalist.
P
He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
W
Well, do you think that there is any merit in any of these conversations… At schools like Harvard, and Yale now…
P
It’s very hard, now Michael (Bierut) is teaching one at Harvard, he’s teaching actually business students about design… Which I think he’s probably going to have more success teaching business students to understand what they’re purchasing when they purchase design than to make design students understand about working with business. I think its almost impossible to teach, you can bring in you know people from marketing departments to give lectures, but its impossible to teach separate from the experience. Because the experience isn’t out of a textbook, the experience is really about human interaction. And its sort of understanding, you have a number of different problems. You have the dialogue that exists between you and your client. Your client usually isn’t one person but a myriad of people and there can be several people and they can be in different decisions and different structures and they have all kinds of interpersonal problems in how they’re structured. That’s one set of parameters that you have to navigate any successful design through for it to survive and you have to know how to deal with that. Then there is the external audience that’s beyond the client who they want to reach and that you have to be able to sort of know not just how you’re going to do that but how are you going to shape that and show it back to your client to discuss why it is viable and why they should do it and why should invest, really hundreds of thousands of dollars in changing something or making something happen to that affect and if you don’t know that and can’t do that you really can’t work.
W
Its funny because what you basically described there is what, from my understanding, from studying advertising and branding – what those firms do. Yet for some reason and I do see the reason, as advertising being vilified by graphic designers but in the same right having a true collaboration with your client as a partner, and not just saying that you are partners, and really backing up what you create with – I don’t want to use the word research but for lack of a better word, but kind of true understanding and compassion of what you are creating and who it is for. That’s really in line with something that graphic design has in many ways repelled in the past.
P
I think that it’s not that graphic design has been repelled by it, I think its. There were firms that tried to make design scientific – which it its not. They would do research that would show that people who bought toothpaste wanted it to be blue and that people. And in fact graphic designers, one of their biggest heroes should be Peter Arnell and its not right now. Peter Arnell persuaded Pepsi that they didn’t need the moisture drops on their can and the reason that soda companies have moisture drops on their can was they were sold a bill of goods by the Schecter Group about twenty years ago that said people who buy soft drinks need refreshment cues to remind them that they are thirsty, therefore there should be – if you go to a cola dispenser it is covered with water. There’s reasons things look the way they do, and they were sold… And it was sold to corporations by designers. By designers who figured out they were very cynical sort of advertising agency owned designers who found a way of using market research to ensure that the business was safe and client was going to buy… The real collaborators, the guys like Rand, who were also serious collaborators with business did it a different way. And that’s more what, I think we would advocate here, which is that you partner with your client, you make them understand that there is no science, and that to a degree there is risk involved, but that there are ways to both communicate with an audience and elevate the expectation of what design can be. And they are both equal goals and that is what you try to do – and it sometimes is an incremental process. If you design a product that changes the paradigm of what design can do in a given area, that’s a huge accomplishment. If you can change the look of a super market, if you can change the look of a CVS, that’s really doing your job. And to do that you actually have to, you have to work and have a communication with a client to have them understand how to do that … And that has nothing to do with technology. Even though all forms of technological forces are going to be used to your disposal it doesn’t matter.
W
Back to what you said about how you think it’s a better fight to do what Michael is doing, by educating business students on the value of design then vice versa.
P
No I think he has an easier shot at it. I’m say that business students work. I think he’s doing all of design a world of good because he’s making business students understand how design functions and what a designer can do for them and what a designer can’t do for them and dispelling scientific myths. So he’s making the process transparent and business students are interested because they’re going to have to purchase it if they’re going to, you know, run magazines they’re going to want to know how to redesign them.. they’re going to want to repackage products, they’re going to want to all sorts of these kind of things.
For design students, teaching them about how business functions is reasonably difficult. You can give an assignment and you can have a real client come to class and actually talk about what they would be looking for but they don’t talk about design the way design is discussed in school so that you have to go through the translation process and I don’t know that you can do that all at once. I think you learn that better in a real world situation. So I just think that designers go to school, they learn the craft in whatever way the school teaches to them to learn it, they come out and they go to work at whatever different place they are and they discover a little bit about how the world works and through that discovery you learn to sort of manipulate your way around it and make it work for you anyway you can.
W
I totally agree with that but I think there could be more to it in the sense that, right now there is obscene idea of “design thinking” out there and to me its absurd because…
P
That’s like saying you don’t think when you’re not designing!
W
Yes!
P
Is there cup thinking (holding up a cup)? Do you have room thinking?
W
And it’s a way to, it’s the next way to… Michael (Bierut) wrote about this in an essay called “Innovation is the New Black” calling design innovation makes it sound scientific. And, you know design thinking is really just the next iteration of that, but what gets me is if designers… If you really look at what design thinking is, its truly just a more holisitic approach to things, its just looking at the whole picture – more complete thinking.
I think if designers have the tools of business thinking, which is an actually thing: organizations, understanding human interaction… Then you would be better off as a designer graduating with those tools as well.
P
Yes, but there is no way to teach it. Because you can’t export it into the classroom. If you interned at a company. If you went and worked at the New York Times, for a summer, and you saw how the paper operated. And then you went back to redesign the New York Times, you’d do a better job at it, than if you were in class and it was assigned to you – even if the person came and talked to you about it. Its just not something you learn, it doesn’t export well to the classroom. And you can’t set up a sort of parable experience. I’ve tried it, its always a little off.
W
I think the closest thing I’ve come across in my career are collaborative enterprises between specific disciplines. Currently I am taking a joint studio class at MIT (that’s actually in the industrial design department at RISD), working with Sloan MBAs and MIT engineering graduates. The experience of having to explain your reasoning behind the work, in my case an interface design project, has enabled me to better understand who I am working with and how best to relate to the needs of my design. The most valuable part of the project is that it is just like “real work.”
P
That’s right, that’s right.
W
And I believe that the more experiences that students can be exposed to like that, would greatly improve design education.
P
There aren’t a lot of those… Why does a student have to be exposed to that? Why can’t they go to work?
W
Because you’re still in school
P
But you’re in school your whole life. Why do you have to do that in a school environment? Who says?
W
I think that is better prepares you for when you get out into the professional world.
P
But, but life is school. I mean it doesn’t matter. Why can’t you go to school and learn what you learn in school and then go into the real world and adapt then
W
Because you did it five years earlier, and then five years down the road you are onto the next thing, moving forward in what you can achieve in your career.
P
It doesn’t work like that, I mean there’s no insurance that schools moves you any degree anyway. I mean there are experiences that schools are good for and there are experiences that life is good for. And you know, sooner or later, you leave school and you go and join life. And in life you learn those things then you find you understand why doing something the way you did it in school is not applicable and that you find a way to adapt to it and grow with it. And that the more open mind that you have about it probably the better and more successful and more productive you will be. And the more rigid you are with preconceived notions about what it should be the harder its going to be for you when you realize it’s not that way. My students always thought every year, I go through the same thing, that they are going to do this portfolio, and that the portfolio… Everything they’ve learned in their life up to this point is in this portfolio, polished and finished to the highest level they can achieve at this moment in time and then when they do this thing they are done. And youre not done. It’s just the beginning. It’s the beginning of life. It’s the end of school. That’s all, it’s the end of school. But that’s school, not the school of life. So that you’ve done that, you’ve had that experience. The school prepares you in whatever way it prepares you – based on what school you selected, and what years you went to that school, depending on who’s teaching at that school. Read the Outliers that will tell you about the sort of accidental nature of this thing and then you go into life and based on what you’ve learned in school and essentially how much energy you have and intelligence and adaptability and perception, you will succeed or fail based on those characteristics all together. That because you have this other thing in school doesn’t mean you’re going to be better when you get out of school it just means that you had another course in school. But its still school.
W
But it can still open your eyes earlier in your life to something that…
P
But you can learn that in a summer internship being in the basement of someplace and like seeing something firsthand.
W
But not everyone is afforded that opportunity and I think that…
P
Well not everybody is going to do things the same way. I mean I know people who are brilliant and successful and are phenomenally well educated and I know people who never went to art school and are better designers and are actually phenomenally successful and doing sensational work.
W
I don’t think there is one path.
P
No there is no one path.
W
I think that it is such a fluid discipline that it allows for so many different ways to reach a successful end and I don’t believe there is one way to get it done.
P
Well that’s the key too, you did say the key to it. Its fluid. And life is fluid. That technology is fluid. And that the most accepting you are of fluidity the most… I think that the stronger and more productive your career will be. If you can accept the notion that there is not an absolute way of doing it.
W
And I think that is what excites me the most is that, and your work is a testament to that… If you showed someone two examples from say the truvia packaging and some of your hand drawn work from a few years back… No one would be able to say “oh that’s the same designer” necessarily. But it is that ability, to continually remold yourself to your situation and your client’s needs, that really makes design work so well.
P
Well the truvia thing was actually a serious and important job because it broke a vernacular of what that sort of looks like. And that was major work and the companies had to have the courage to do it and that was a year’s worth… the design took us about ten minutes. The refinement… Well not ten minutes, there was a meeting, we did some, we changed the name of it but we arrived at it pretty quickly then we did like little you know the package had to be finessed- the machine only could cut it this way so we had to change the proportion and sort of meememe. But the ability to sort of persuade two corporations, not one because it was a partnership, to actually come out with something that was so dramatically different was a huge success. And the proof was how it popped on the aisle. Because the way we sold it, all I did when we went to present it the very first time was get all the stuff that’s in the store and just stick it right down on the table and don’t say anything else to it. Because you could do that and but I had figured out not just to do that but to do that at this time, because it was the timing and the condition of the companies and what their image was and what they wanted to be that enabled you to do that because there would be another time where you needed to blend in, and you have to know when to take that shot and that risk. And when they’ll come with you. That’s what that experience of understanding their communities does for you because you know how to
W
Position
P
Exactly.
W
You mentioned that it was a “serious” project, and that just reminded me of your TED talk…
P
Oh I didn’t mean serious in that way… No it was serious in terms of business. It wasn’t serious in terms of my work
W
You mentioned in that talk that you haven’t done too much “serious work” lately, its been mostly “solemn” and looking at some of what you’ve produced… It’s definitely more clean-cut and refined lately, is that because that’s what people want right now and that’s what your clients want while you’d rather be creating something that’s more expressive from the self?
P
No it has to do with the nature of the projects… If I take the Public Theatre as opposed to say doing the New York City Ballet or the New York Philharmonic or MoMA. When I did the Public Theatre which was an erratic identity and it involved my own personal language, and it was good because I did every single piece of it - and when I didn’t do it, it was bad. And it was irresponsible to the Public to a certain degree and I’ve redesigned the Public so its much more “solemn” but it functions better for the Public.
W
The actual mark you’re saying?
P
No the mark is irrelevant. Everybody make a big deal about marks. No, no, no when you do identities for organizations, you’re not just doing a mark, you’re doing massive components of stuff because a mark could be ripped off. You want to create literature, you want to create websites, you want to create things that have a real look and the look is usually a collection of things. It’s a collection of typefaces, colors, bars, slashes, rules, images and the images have specific styles so you can recognize the style of the place.
W
So you’re talking about the hamlet poster, and the extension of the Public’s identity.
P
Well the Hamlet poster was later, but actually the most current thing. I can actually show you it… let me get my power book. It’s a question of designing something that someone else can execute, and when you design, you can’t as an individual designer. I can’t as a business person, put out every single piece that from my hand but what I am doing now is designing systems that other people execute. And when the other designers work with it they can’t be as complex or idiosyncratic as when I do it myself because there are a million little iterations that I do all the time that I do instinctively. So when you design something for somebody else, you’re necessarily more solemn because its more structured. That’s the nature of the beast. But on the one hand it’s a real choice and I’m really conflicted about it because… As a designer, working for my clients, I think to a degree I was irresponsible with the public theatre, even though they love me and I’ll be there forever and I can do whatever I want… but when I got into the Lincoln Center Institutions, they had to be able to fulfill, they had to be able to execute it. What happened at the Metropolitan Opera for example is that I designed a system that I thought was very simple but it wasn’t flexible enough for the advertisements to they gave the advertisements out to an ad agency and they made it horrible. But the thing was they were capable of fulfilling and turning these around in a day and the designers in house couldn’t turn these around in a day so it got lost and its terrible. The New York City Ballet is much more consistent.
W
So do you ever consult with outside agencies to remedy this problem?
P
Absolutely, I hire them… I hired Julia Hoffman, who used to work for me to go up to MoMA because I designed the stuff then I gave it to her to put out so it would look the same. I mean I do that all the time. It’s not just doing design, you’re doing management consulting. What you find out is why departments don’t function properly. You’ll find there is some in-house art director and they’re really quite terrific, they’re just beleaguered because the structure of the organization is bad and you’re reporting to too many people and the hierarchy.
W
Exactly, that’s what you mentioned early in your book… about the hierarchy at CBS…
P
Well you have to figure that stuff out because there are reasons why things don’t look good and they don’t have anything to do with context or the design, it has to do with the way something is structured. So anyway that’s really what you… first you learn how to design something and that’s all you’re doing in school is learning how – in your own modest way with whatever technology is at hand at that given moment, this is all going to change in a week anyway. You’re learning how to design something and you can have all kinds of philosophies about it and all kinds of beliefs about it and you can work on the computer or the pad or whatever but I’m telling you none of it matters. What matters is taking this little bit of knowledge that you got in school and then going out into a world of change and a world of people concentrating on other things other than your craft and trying to make things be expressive, make sense, communicate and do all the things they do. And when they don’t try to figure out why they’re not doing it and then try to fix it so they do. And that’s all it is. And its hard and it changes all the time. And its hard to make invention when you’re trying to manage people, its hard to make change when something works. Its hard to break paradigms, its hard to move organizations. There are lots of things that are hard – you learn what they are.
W
It’s worth it though right?
P
It’s great, it’s a great life. But you know, school is another life. School is not the same life. There’s nothing wrong with getting out of school.
W
Great, that was great. You know the only thing that I take away personally is that I do feel like we are at this critical moment when we, as designers, have the ear of a much larger community and if we just say “let designers just design” and we’ll collaborate when we can and not really reach out and seek problems, becoming equal partners. Because there is still a problem in a lot of organizations, that design isn’t considered as an equal partner.
P
What are you talking about?
W
I’m saying that if we as designers just sit back while the business community and society at large is calling for us to do more, what are we really achieving?
P
Oh, what you don’t understand is that the businesses want design. If design helps them become heroes, and helps them sell products and helps them do things more efficiently, then they’re going to like design. It has more to do with the way organizations are structured. If you take something simple like a magazine. A magazine is structured where the head person on the masthead is a publisher and there’s a managing editor, and there’s usually a separation of state where the managing guy oversees all the people selling advertising space and that’s over there and then within the actual making of the product. And a magazine is a perfect example because a magazine is one of the things that the design is the product and the art and editorial is what you are selling. You’ll see editor, editor-in-chief, managing editor, then you’re going to see two or three editors, then you’re going to see creative director or design director. Then you’re going to see a couple more editors then you’re going to see an art director with like about that much space down from the creative director. Then you’re going to see a bunch of like low peon people. So they’re all going to be working making this magazine and the design director is going to be trying to persuade the editor to do something. And the editor, when he has to get a second opinion is going to call in his fellow editors, he’s never going to call in the art department to get their opinion. He’s going to call in the guys he goes to lunch with. And when lunch happens he’s going to go out with the other editors, he’s never going to go out with the art department. And that is the heart of the issue – it’s all social. If you go to any corporation, like what happens at institutions like the Lincoln Center and why its so difficult for me to keep the stuff looking well is that there might be a marketing person in power but the people who run the art department are way way down and they don’t meet the top people.
W
So then the success of breaking this would be to elevate designers into leadership positions, and that’s what happened at places like GBH and CBS. And that’s why Chris Pullman retired, because he was going to have to report to a marketing person.
P
That’s right, and that’s why CBS ended up failing, because when Tisch took over and Stanton was long dead, Lou Dorfsman didn’t have any power anymore.
W
So that’s why I think that if a designer has more, and again I know your stance on the education part, but if you have more tools to elevate yourself within an organization then the more impact you can have with your design.
P
Why would school give you those tools? Most people in business have real disdain for overly educated snot rags.
W
Its not overly educated, its zero education in business.
P
Who has zero education?
W
Most design students have zero education in business and organizations.
P
I don’t think education in business is the answer.
W
No, I don’t think it’s the answer but I think there is much of a culture in design schools that enable students to think like leaders.
P
I’ve worked with too many people who went to business school and they’re not leaders either. Most the people that are leaders are individual visionaries who, if you take somebody like Bill Paily (founder of CBS). It was somebody who understood both technology and entertainment in a time when he had an idea and took a risk and invested money.
W
So you don’t think that that can really help the position of the designer?
P
No, I think that there will be companies that will be design driven like Apple, because they’ll have a leader like Steve Jobs and give a lot of power to their designers and listen to them. But CBS was great because Paily gave power to Frank Stanton who kept Dorfsman in a position of power and when the management changes the role changes and it doesn’t matter whether the person went to business school. Really things are much more incidental than that. They’re not if you go here and do this then that will happen.
W
Its not like there can be some paradigm shift in all of this, it has to be the individual.
P
Yes, you could go to business school and be completely inarticulate. You could go to business school and be a terrible designer. I mean all of those things can happen. There formula for it. It really is, as I said, the best answer to anything is the not that life is fluid, that things change, that one needs to have an absolutely open mind, and to be ready to look at situations and respond to them on the turn of a dime and to make things work. And all of life is like that and it doesn’t matter if its design or business or government. It’s incredibly complex and incredibly simple at the same time. You see systemic failures in things like the banking system, which I know pretty intimately because you know we did the Citibank logo and I was around when travelers merger with Citi: the thing that caused the debacle.
W
One of the things.
P
It’s one of the things that were part of the systemic failure when the bank that got too big.
W
Yes. Well, first off thank you, its been a wonderful conversation
P
Well good I hope you got something good out of it. And don’t worry about studying business in school, go out in the world and study business. You can just study business by working for somebody…
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